The Establishment

What attracted his attention was a scandal involving two Foreign Office officials, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, who had defected to the Soviet Union. Fairlie suggested that friends of the two men had attempted to shield their families from media attention.

This, he asserted, revealed that “what I call the ‘establishment’ in this country is today more powerful than ever before”. His piece made “the establishment” a household phrase — and made Fairlie’s name in the process.

For Fairlie, the establishment included not only “the centres of official power — though they are certainly part of it” — but “the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised”.

This “exercise of power”, he claimed, could only be understood as being “exercised socially”. In other words, the establishment comprised a set of well-connected people who knew one another, mixed in the same circles and had one another’s backs. It was not based on official, legal or formal arrangements, but rather on “subtle social relationships”.

Fairlie’s establishment consisted of a diverse network of people. It was not just the likes of the prime minister and the archbishop of Canterbury, but also incorporated “lesser mortals” such as the chairman of the Arts Council, the director general of the BBC and the editor of the Times Literary Supplement, “not to mention divinities like Lady Violet Bonham Carter” — the daughter of former Liberal prime minister Herbert Asquith, confidante of Winston Churchill and grandmother of future Hollywood actor Helena Bonham Carter.

The Foreign Office was, Fairlie claimed, “near the heart of the pattern of social relationships which so powerfully controls the exercise of power in this country”, stacked as it was with those who “know all the right people”. In other words, the establishment was all about “who you know”.

(Hat tip to Outsideness, who describes it as so upside-down it almost gets it.)

Leave a Reply

Search

Search for:

Recent Comments

Alrenous: So children get more healthcare but don’t become healthier. You don’t say.

Scipio Americanus: I have it on the word of a very reliable source that the criteria for declassification of anything related to nuclear weapons have been massively and unreasonably tightened over the last few years. I’d venture a guess that it’s due to technically ignorant sensitivity to proliferation risk.

Senexada: Another incident of the null hypothesis is the Cherokee Land Lottery of 1832, a “natural experiment” which had nearly universal participation by white males, and in which the winners received a wealth shock equal to roughly the median wealth. The result: Sons of winners have no better adult outcomes (wealth, income, literacy) than the sons of non-winners, and winners’ grandchildren do not have higher literacy or school attendance than non-winners’ grandchildren. This suggests only a...

Grasspunk: These are the best photos the WSJ could come up with? These guys aren’t attractive enough to be hipsters.

Slovenian Guest: The Empire kicking rebel ass, hell yeah, git-r-done! It’s almost scary how right they got the ’80s look, feel & sound… as if the creators of the Galaxy Rangers went on and made a Star Wars cartoon. The current “official” Star Wars Rebels 3D CGI animated television series looks like an abomination in comparison.

Isegoria: The full report implies that “moderate-to-severe” crashes involve more than 1 g of acceleration: For this study, 1,691 moderate-to-severe crashes involving young drivers ages 16-19 were reviewed. Of these crashes, 727 were vehicle-to-vehicle crashes in which the force of the impact was 1.0g or greater, and 964 were single-vehicle crashes in which the vehicle’s tires left the roadway and impacted (with a force of 1.0g or greater) one or more natural or artificial objects. While the extent of any...

Isegoria: While cell phones don’t provide the majority of distractions, I think it’s fair to say that they introduce a new, large source of distractions. I agree that there’s a certain circularity, in that teens with bad judgment tend to compound their problems by introducing more distractions — but the teens in the videos certainly appeared typical. Also, the increase was in “moderate-to-sever e” crashes — which presumably excludes fender-benders.

Alrenous: It’s extremely important that cell phones are not even the majority of distractions, even though they consistently get top billing. The worst distraction is other people. Their statistics don’t add up properly, but something like two thirds of distractions statically associated with accidents are neither cellphones nor people. There’s also the ever-present racism causation problem. Does distraction cause poor driving or are poor drivers likely to let themselves get distracted?...